The weekend of November 10th was known as Innovation Weekend at Fishbowl Solutions. Fishbowl’s development, sales and marketing teams participated in a “ShipIT Hackathon” event to develop new Oracle WebCenter Content-based products. If you aren’t familiar with hackathons, just imagine a very intense software programming session where the end goal is to develop usable software within a set period of time – here is Wikipedia’s definition, and you may remember that Fishbowl participated in a similar hackathon at Oracle OpenWorld. Anyway, Fishbowl’s WebCenter UI and UX design extraordinaire, John Sim, was visiting from London and he was the catalyst for Fishbowl’s internal hackathon. Here were the rules that he helped establish:

The new software/functionality should either support one of Fishbowl’s current products or provide new ways to interact, utilize, or provide an integration with Oracle WebCenter Content.

The finished product should be deployable to Fishbowl’s internal WebCenter Content system and be usable by Fishbowl employees.

Teams will have only 24 hours to complete their product.

The winning team would be decided by votes from all participants, but participants could not vote for their own team.

At 3:00 PM on Friday, November 9th the hacking commenced. Fueled by Red Bull, pizza, coffee and sugar, four teams of Fishbowl employees developed the following WebCenter-based programs by 3:00 PM on Saturday, November 10th where they were presented and voted on. Here they are in order of finish:

1st Place – WebCenter Content Multi-Checkin

Enables users to drag and drop content items directly into Oracle WebCenter Content from desktops or file shares and be tagged with keywords.

Checked in content bypasses the check in metadata screen and instead is grouped within a user’s “workspace”. Users can return to their workspace at a later time to add metadata.

Integrates with Fishbowl’s Duplicate File Checker to ensure that duplicate content items do no enter the system.

(The winning hackers – left to right: Paul Heupel, John Sim, Tom Jaede)

2nd Place – Filtered Search Results and Grid View Metadata Updater

Update metadata on multiple items at once using a simple grid format.

Content Server query defines items to display in grid view with configurable sorting and result count.

Easily configure columns to view and update both standard and custom metadata values.

Uses Excel-like functionality within the browser such as copy, paste, drag, and fill-down.

Users simply browse to a folder or item and select the content they want to check against already existing in Oracle WebCenter Content. Any duplicate items are returned to the user in a grid view, and the user can select any duplicates for deletion.

Google Drive files can be batch imported and their metadata can be mapped or the files can be published directly to WebCenter Content.

Includes ability to also link to Google Drive document directly from WebCenter Content.

Aside from some mild cases of indigestion, carpal tunnel, and weariness; the participants in Fishbowl’s ShipIT hackathon all agreed that it was a great event to be a part of. It was really exciting to see what could be developed in a limited amount of time when a group of people worked together and were driven by a deadline. The best part was ending up with four new WebCenter-based products that solve real-world problems and add immediate value. If any of these products interest you, feel free to contact us at 952-465-3400 or info@fishbowlsolutions.com.

However, there are a couple of things that are not quite right in the guide.

You must create the domain after you have run the UCM installer. When creating the domain, you must launch the configuration from the start menu (or navigate to it directly in {Middleware_Home}Oracle_ECM11gcommonbinconfig.cmd)

If you have spaces in your PATH environment variable, you may need to edit the {base_domain}binstartWebLogic.cmd to explicitly set the path. On my machine I added the following on line 73:
set PATH=C:appsOracleproduct11.2.0dbhome_1bin;C:
Javajdk1.6.0_16_32bitbin;%SystemRoot%
system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%System32Wbem;

In addition, there are a couple things you must do when installing in Windows 7:

When running the Fusion Middleware Configuration Wizard, you will get dependency errors when trying to generate an automatically configured domain. Before running this tool, you must browse to the {Middleware_Home}/oracle_common. You will be prompted by UAC. After browsing to that directory the wizard should work.

Check back soon for more tips on 11g!

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The third part in our series will dig deeper into documentation processes for 11g. Before installing Oracle WebCenter 11g, developers need to become familiar with the some key issues so they won’t configure themselves into a corner when creating the architecture for the system.

So, when you’re ready to upgrade, take a half a day to become aware of the interplay between the systems before you attempt installation.

Oracle has provided the following sites to help developers become more aware of the system: